Hello,nomally I do my MP3 encoding with Lame using the Joint Stereo option. What I have learned so far is that there shouldn't be a big difference in sound quality between joint stereo and normal stereo (beside from what audiophile geeks think about the topic). Now I notice that in my MP3's there is a easyly perceptible difference between joint stereo and normal stereo: It seems that the right channel is not really present (it sounds very far away and damp, but this could be a left-over from the left channel), and the left channel sounds loud as normal but in the middle and not left. You can download a wav and corresponding mp3 file (to hear what I mean) from here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18990880/JointStereoTest.zip (6MB)This really surprises me, as it's really a big quality reduction of joint stereo. So, up to now, I think that I am doing something wrong in the encoding, but I did a lot of tweaking and nothing did change this effect.

Just going by your description, it sounds like mid-side stereo frames are being decoded as if they are simple stereo.The left channel is the mid (L + R, i.e. the 'sum') and the right channel is the side (L - R, i.e. the 'difference').

The .zip you pointed to seems to be corrupt.

What version of LAME are you using and where did you get it?And what are you using to play the MP3?

Joint stereo shouldn't produce such behavior as you describe. At least not Mid-Side version of it. But Inensity-Stereo version of it only applies to very low bitrates, so I don't think that's your case, or is it? What's your target bitrare?

Yes, the link works now... You are getting a very strange output. Your mp3 file is MPEG 2 Layer III @ 22050 Hz... What settings are you using for LAME? Your resulting mp3 should be MPEG 1 Layer III @ 44100 Hz.

Wow, that's it...In the settings there is a version field which I set to MPEG II.5 (assuming that higher versions are more modern and appropriate ;-) ). I set it to MPEG I and now the resulting mp3 sounds like expected! Strange, I was nearly sure that I tried this setting, too...

Yeah, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-2.5 can confuse you if you don't know what's it all about. But in this case a higher number doesn't mean better encoder, because MPEG group was working to achieve a good format for broadcast and not for digital storage as was the case with MPEG-1.

LAME gives you a lot of knobs to play with, but you really need very few of them. It's tempting to think you can research them all and use non-default settings and get better quality, but consensus here is that it's not that easy, and that the defaults are often exactly what you want. http://lame.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/lam...html/usage.html